Tuesday, September 29, 2009

A hectic week, and fabulous weekend...

* Names have been changed to preserve any remaining dignity of the people concerned

Due to Heritage day last week, I had to cram a 5 day week into 3 days (the public holiday was on a Thursday, and I was going away). So I frantically tried to achieve all my goals for the week, I burned and watched many DVDs of mouse behaviour, freaked out completely a few times when some of them wouldn't work, shopped and tried to pack. I also went out, had a good dose of vitamin C, and finally packed properly. This time I managed to get about 4 hours of sleep before Jenny came to pick me up the next morning...

The drive was... interesting... We sang along to pretty much every song that played, had random discussions, and came up with a few key saying that would stick for the rest of the trip. there were:

Long live Champ Leia

Johnny Clegg is The Man

Mary* is like a posh old zombie goat, living on an island, without a pet rabbit.

Other sayings that popped up during the hike included:

Henry's* insect cream is The Man.

Damn those Mexicans!!

We stayed in a place that had some incredibly amazing rock formations on Thursday and Saturday nights. We were not the only people staying in the camp: a group that came from Bloemfontein and Pretoria were staying in the same place, and doing the same hike as us. We managed to creep them out completely by going for random walks around the kitchen area, in single file and in complete silence... After deciding not to freak them out any more, we retired to the lookout point with some whisky coffee, and watched the clouds and lightning (it wasn't raining).

The next day turned out to be heavily overcast, and thus, we all overslept. We had a big cook-up breakfast, and left after distributing and re-distributing weight between packs. Jen and I are officially not girl pants. We also discovered that my trail-mix is amazing: at every stop, it came out and everyone had a good few handfuls. I have to admit, I was carrying half, and I made sure that everyone had some... The walk that day was absolutely amazing, as we walked into gullies, past waterfalls and up streams. The only part that I didn't like was the ladders - for some reason I felt like I was about to tip over head-first...

After a very long hike, some awesome food (who knew cherry tomatoes would taste so good?), we reached our over-night stop. The Bloem-Pta group had arrived before us, but kindly left two rooms open for us. I cooked an amazing risotto meal, which was even enjoyed by the sceptics among us... After a crazy night, consisting of red wine, whisky hot chocolate and coffee, howling at the moon, and card games, I managed to catch an early night.

The following morning, we woke up to a bright and sunny day. It was Hot. Very Hot. We explored the bobbejaan's (baboon's) hotel, had lunch and a long swim. I felt super-exhausted at the end of the day, and faded relatively rapidly in the night. Apparently, I missed some goings-on...

The following morning proved to be equally hot, and while we waited for Bob*, Jen and I practiced our rock-jumping, photo-taking techniques. Apparently, I suck at this. Something to do with not lifting my feet high enough or something...

I will post photos on the blog soon. I just haven't had the energy to download any yet!!!

22/10/2009: It has taken me forever to download these pictures, but here are some of the Rooikrans camp. Pretty, hey?